Affect
should not be confused with a personal sentiment or feeling. Affects are
encounters between bodies, material objects, and mental or ideal bodies.
Moreover, the study of affect crosses over into perceptions of the environment,
which is composed of sensory information. Yet affect often appears to be
unconscious and non-ideological, which represents a challenge to intellectual
and rationalist approaches to phenomena.

The interest
in affect could be understood as an appeal to a new materialism that explores
embodiment of sensations.

Ruth Leys
(434) has argued that a common distinction between affect and emotion cannot be
sustained.

2. Scope

As with
feminism(s), there are many schools of affect theory, ranging across a wide variety
of disciplines and multiple zones and fields of research.

The study of
affect is trans-disciplinary. Major journals and influential monographs have
addressed the notion of affect and the affective turn, especially in the
humanities and the social sciences. (See 6. Further Reading).

Also, we
need to consider affect theory as trans-subjective. It is not bounded or
limited to a single, unified, human subject.

However, we
should be cautious about claiming a comfortable or uncritical collaboration between
disciplines that are highly suspicious of each other’s methods and assumptions
about truth-claims, evidence and verifiability. Rumours of a wide-reaching
rapprochement between the humanities and social sciences have been exaggerated.

Indeed, the
historical co-operation and porousness of disciplinary boundaries in the past
is often repressed in the rigour and precision of contemporary disciplines.
Stepping outside the familiar zone might be perceived as an act of heresy
andlead to professional suicide in
academe.

3. History
of Affect

Following the
writings of Spinoza (1632-1677) in his posthumously published book Ethics, three kinds of affect can be
understood. First, pleasure or joy (laetitia). Second, pain or sorrow (tristitia).
These are movements, respectively, towards greater and lesser levels of
perfection. Third, desire (cupiditas) or appetite, is explained as ‘the
very essence of man insofar as his essence is conceived as determined to any
action from any given affection of itself.’

Notably, Spinoza
did not believe that reason could defeat emotion. Emotions are displaced only
by stronger emotions. He stressed the significance of intuitive knowledge. He
was also a determinist, arguing against the notion of free-will.

Spinoza’s
work was admired by Hegel, Nietzsche and Marx. The emphasis on the body is also
evident in twentieth-century thought, in the writings of Henri Bergson, Gilles
Deleuze and Félix Guattari.

Spinoza

4. Anti-Affect

The
affective turn can also be understood as a reaction to the influential philosophical
ideas of Plato, Descartes and Kant.

Plato:
corporeality obstructs the path to virtue and the immaterial (spirit)

Descartes:
the essential core of humanity (being) is its thought (cogito)

Kant: the
universality of ethics excludes the particularity of the individual body

5. Twenty
questions and points to think about

i.There
has been a shift from the sociology of the body to modes of corporeality.
Increasingly the focus is on flows, speed, and movement. Does the shift to various
types of immateriality and virtual worlds/bodies (in late capitalism and postmodernism)
undermine the subject as a rational, potentially enlightened self?

ii.How
do these ideas relate to modernism (William James’s account of personality as a
‘stream of consciousness’; fragmentation, alienation) and to postmodern pre-occupations
that embrace the technologized body?

iii.Given
the multiplication of what we mean by the body, it is less certain that it can
become a stable foundation upon which to construct, or to study, difference.

iv.On
the other hand, is a new account of power possible on the basis of a keener understanding
or processes of consumption and production of embodied perception (in the
media, for example)?

v.Is
affect prior to thought, or ideology?

vi.Does
affect have a ‘truth’ that precedes language or intention?

vii.Are
the emotions pre-cognitive and automatic?

viii.Does
the previous question help to explain the anti-intentionalism that has been generated
within psychological investigation?

ix.In
the affective turn, what are we turning towards
and from what are we turning away ?

x.The
affective turn challenges dualism and potentially also interrogates the absoluteness
of the opposition.

xi.In
a philosophical role-reversal, is there a tendency to celebrate the body and matter and condemn mind and spirit? (This reveals that we are locked in a
dualism that has merely been turned against the dominant Western tradition;
turned upside down)

xii.Is
it possible to have a mediation within
the dualism, or must one simply choose from the opposed sides?

xiii.The
‘turn’ needs to be challenged as it underestimates how far earlier
philosophical and critical systems were already engaged in methodologies and categories
that reveal an affective element. For example, it is a parody of the enlightened
philosophy that it was a pure reason. Yet ultra-rationalism is often taken as
the benchmark of counter-affectivity.

xiv.Similarly,
the absolute dualism of mind/body can be challenged. While they are deemed to
be ontologically different, their functions might be intertwined in reality.

xv.We
should be cautious also in rooting the emotions or passions in the body; there
is a risk in embodiment that involves ruling out the role of reason altogether:
the tyranny of embodiment.

xvi.Reason
sometimes achieves and often asserts a critical distance from the emotions. Reason
employs a dialogue with the emotions. Does this muddy the waters between the
binary opposition?

xvii.It
is evident that there a tension between a method based in epistemology and phenomenology
on the one hand, and hermeneutics and existentialism, on the other. In other
words, this division simply replays an opposition between the philosophyof knowledge and the philosophy of life.

xviii.While
theories of representation are grounded in semiotics
(signs) and the techniques of rhetoric, affect theory examines other
kinds of encounter and interaction. Research has also increasingly investigated
the kinds of topic traditionally neglected in academic study: movement and
sensation.

xix.How
does the affective turn impact on cognitive approaches in the social sciences?

xx.How
should the new materialism and new media technologies be studied?

You either do your work or prepare for a trip to the office. (Either do, or prepare)He is not only handsome, but also brilliant. (Not only A, but also B)Not only is he handsome, but also he is brilliant. (Not only is he A, but also he is B)Neither the basketball team nor the football team is doing well.Both the cross country team and the swimming team are doing well.You must decide whether you stay or you go.Just as many Americans love basketball, so many Canadians love ice hockey.The more you practice dribbling, the better you will be at it.Football is as fast as hockey (is (fast)).Football is as much an addiction as it is a sport.No sooner did she learn to ski, than the snow began to thaw.I would rather swim than surf.

A handy guide for beginners is Manik Joshi's Examples of English Correlatives: Correlative Words and Sentences.